GIRL FROM THE NORTH COUNTRY at the Gielgud Theatre - no direction home

When GIRL FROM THE NORTH COUNTRY premiered at the Old Vic in 2017, the idea of sitting through a musical consisting of Bob Dylan songs left me cold so I avoided it but of course it gathered rave reviews and two Olivier Awards - if it had not been for the HAMILTON juggernaut I am sure it would have been more.  After three months at the Old Vic, it played a further three months at the Noel Coward Theatre, but I still couldn't work up the courage to see it.  So when a revival was announced at the Gielgud Theatre I made sure seats were booked - and I'm glad I did.

We saw it the night after the General Election and as I was in a deep depression I figured nothing would shift my humour but it was actually the perfect show for my state, it lifted me up with excellent ensemble work, fine individual performances, and the chance to have a quiet weep in the dark.  Four years ago, Irish playwright Conor McPherson was approached by Bob Dylan's record company with the suggestion of turning some of his back catalogue into a stage musical but McPherson - known for his powerful dramas which are haunted by unseen malign influences such as THE WEIR - politely refused.  He had never attempted a musical before and couldn't see how Dylan's work would fit into one.

But it preyed on his mind and the idea came to him of setting it in the Minnesota of 1934 (where Dylan would be born seven years later) - a mix of John Steinbeck and Southern Gothic.  He contacted the record company and soon received an e-mail saying Dylan gave the idea a green light and promptly sent him 40 Dylan albums with permission to use any of them in whatever style he wanted, which is wonderfully trusting for such a musical figure.  McPherson knew he wanted the music to be played on instruments used in 1934 and working closely with orchestrator and arranger Simon Hale, he has certainly achieved a very individual sound.  Some purists have argued that songs sound unlike the Dylan originals but it shows how protean the material is which spans from the 1960s onwards and includes a healthy dollop of 1970s and 1980s album tracks... no jukebox musical here.

All the action centres on a ramshackle Duluth boarding house run by husband and wife Nick and Elizabeth Laine, but the bank is threatening to foreclose on it and Elizabeth is slowly submerging into early dementia.  Their son Gene aspires to be a writer but drinks more than he types, and their adopted black daughter Marianne - abandoned as a baby by a non-paying guest - stoically nurses Elizabeth and acts as general housemaid to the guests.

One of their guests is Mrs Neilson, a widow who is waiting for her husband's will to be finalized; she and Nick are clandestine lovers who dream of running away to set up their own hotel with her inheritance.  The only other guests are Mr and Mrs Burke - living in reduced circumstances thanks to the Depression - and their retarded son Elias.  Marianne is five months pregnant but refuses to divulge the father's identity; her adopted father Nick is attempting a 'deal' with the local - and aged - shoe-peddler Mr Perry to marry Marianne for the companionship she will offer, but Marianne resists this arrangement.

One stormy night, two new guests - Reverend Marlowe and Joe Scott - arrive at the rooming house: the former says he is an itinerant holier-than-thou bible-seller and the other a black one-time-contender boxer but are they?  Life over the coming months gets no easier for the occupants of the boarding house until it culminates in Nick and Elizabeth alone at their dining table with the audience on the edge of their seats...

It sounds grim and, in places, it was - McPherson again shadows characters with the unforgettable trauma of dead children - and the action builds to an unbearably tense peak as Nick sees a way out, but the characters are all written in such a humane, non-judgmental way that you are drawn into their sad little stories, hoping for a resolution for them that will make life better.  The whole story is narrated occasionally by the town doctor who knows most of the occupants' secrets and a few of his own, in a style reminiscent of The Stage Director in Thornton Wilder's OUR TOWN: he tells the story but is also one step ahead of the action to describe their later lives.

In a nod to the radio days of the 1930s, the solos are sung into old radio microphones which gives the impression that these numbers are more to do with what is happening in the character's minds than simply singing a song to someone.  As I said, the idea of an evening of Bob Dylan songs once had me running a mile from the show but McPherson has chosen songs that were all fairly new to me - at best I knew five of the twenty listed songs - but they are woven so well into the fabric of the story and in the unified sound of Hale's 1930s instruments, that three in particular had me hooked: TIGHT CONNECTION TO MY HEART, SWEETHEART LIKE YOU and TRUE LOVE TENDS TO FORGET.

Conor McPherson directs the show beautifully, always keeping an air of fragile unease while eliciting a wonderful ensemble performance from his 19 cast members but I particularly want to mention the marvellous work of Katie Brayben as the mentally lost Elizabeth, a difficult role to place as most of it she spends glowering at the world from her chair but rising to deliver scorching versions of LIKE A ROLLING STONE - growling through the song of her now untethered life - and a heartbreaking FOREVER YOUNG; Anna-Jane Casey as the secretly doped-up Mrs Burke (and occasional drummer); Rachel John who is wonderfully sympathetic as Mrs Neilsen and in excellent voice; Finbar Lynch's weaselly Reverend Marlowe; Donald Sage Mackay's quietly despairing Nick; Gloria Obiyanyo's secretive and wary Marianne with a voice that sounds like a mix of Tracy Chapman and Joan Armatrading, and Shaq Taylor's proud boxer Joe Scott.  All this and Gemma Sutton too in an all-too-brief role as Gene's departing girlfriend.

Rae Smith's designs are as spare and lean as the Minnesota dust bowl while Mark Henderson delivers another masterclass in story-telling through lighting.  A special mention too for the four-man onstage band who weave such a great musical backdrop throughout the show.

GIRL FROM THE NORTH COUNTRY is on at the Gielgud until 1st February - run to see this truly remarkable show of people's power to love and endure...

THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE at The Bridge Theatre - A roaring success?

When I was in primary school, one of my favourite books was CS Lewis' 1950 fantasy novel THE LION THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE; a gripping narrative, likeable characters, and the titanic struggle between Aslan the lion and the nasty White Witch leading to a final battle for Narnia's throne.  Then someone told me "You DO know it's all about religion don't you?" and my heart broke.  CS Lewis you utter sod.  That then put me off any fantasy-type novel or film... I just sit there waiting for the God analogy to clump like a second boot.

It was with a heavy heart that I went to see the 2005 film but found that I still could really enjoy it's story - and Aslan's mane was WELL strokeable - and to be honest I thought of that film most of the time I was watching Sally Cookson's stage production, currently playing at The Bridge Theatre.  It's definitely time for another viewing.

Did I hate it?  No.  Did I like it then?  Let's just say I got the production I expected when I heard that Sally Cookson had directed it.  Her production of PETER PAN at the National - was it REALLY three years ago? - was one of the most annoying experiences I have sat through.  But happy to say, after a first half that fairly lumped along, the second half picked up the pace and delivered some fairly neat stage images thanks to Rae Smith's designs.  Sometimes though, it might just be pleasant to see an effect onstage that is truly magical without knowing that it is just a tea-chest with a drapery thrown over it courtesy of 'poor theatre' techniques.

The show is billed as being 'conceived by the company' - how '70s - but there is a 'writer in the room' credit for Adam Peck and he certainly did well in distilling such an epic down onto the Bridge stage.  Among the standard over-stated performance with over-emphatic regional dialects, there were a few good performances - Stuart Neal was a graceful Mr Tumnus whose disappearance halfway through is keenly felt, Shalisha James-Davis and Keziah Joseph were good as Susan and Lucy Pevensie - the actors who played Peter and Edmund were fairly nondescript - and I liked Wil Johnson's commanding Aslan, although Laura Elphinstone as The White Witch was rather underwhelming.

I also thought Dean Nolan and Beverly Rudd had a good partnership as the Beavers who help the Pevensie children, and while Benji Bower's music was anodyne folky stuff, Bruno Poet worked some magic of his own with his lighting designs; a word too for the choreographed moves by Dan Canham who kept the stage traffic moving.

So there we go, an amiable 2 and a half hours that might not have done it for me - maybe my head was too full of that night's election results - but hopefully a few of the kids and teens in the audience might have seen something on the stage that made them realize the joy of live theatre and set them off on their own journey.

I must add the poster image is a wonderful design - now, where is that film version... 

MACBETH at the Olivier Theatre... Mad Macbeth

Going in to see Rufus Norris' new production of MACBETH at the Olivier Theatre it struck me that, having seen the play four times previously on stage, I had yet to see one that I found fully satisfactorily.  I still haven't...

During the opening I found myself thinking of RuPaul's command before the final lip-sync competition on RUPAUL'S DRAG RACE "DON'T fuck it up"... It was a waste of time, because the fucking up appeared to have occured some time before I arrived.  Once again - and it is happening with increasing regularity - I sat there thinking 'why couldn't anyone have spoken up during either the rehearsals or tech run and said "Is it me or is this shite not working"?

As with Nicholas Hytner's JULIUS CAESAR playing further down the Thames at The Bridge, any onstage cutting and stabbing has been matched offstage by the filleting of sections of Shakespeare's text.  Why this is done so often now is beyond me - a misguided attempt to just focus on the main characters?  An attempt to streamline the action to fit it into a certain concept or running time?  Both productions were attended by several school groups - what does the teacher say to the pupils when they study the text next: "You can skip the next page, Nicholas Hytner says it's surplus to requirements", or "Eye of newt, and toe of frog? Don't bother with that, Rufus Norris says it's expendable."

Rufus Norris certainly has a concept... and boy, is it driven home with relentless monotony.  Designer Rae Smith has conjured up a relentlessly ugly vision of a dystopian wasteland, a mostly bare stage is dominated by a large sloped walkway that wanders around the stage like rogue airport boarding stairs which also features a few tall blasted thin trees with ugly plastic fronds atop them.  The bin bag ethic is also featured in large oily-looking drapes that cover most of the stage at times - actually I quite liked them with their suggestion of all-encompassing demonic wings - and this look reaches it's apogee in the bizarre idea that Macbeth's castle has rooms that look like concrete pillboxes with black bin bags piled up in corners.  Go figure...

Costume designer Mauritz Junge has expended no imagination at all: the costumes are drab, ill-fitting fatigues or dirty jeans, vests and clumpy boots usually covered up by shapeless woolly coats.  King Duncan wears a particularly ugly red suit - which of course Macbeth turns up in after Duncan's death - and don't get me started on Lady Macbeth who is obviously allowed a bit of glamour when she becomes Queen and is fitted out with what looks like a handmade red sequined frock of shiteous quality.  It all suggests that Norris lent the creative team a dvd of MAD MAX and said "Something like this maybe...?"

Nothing lifts the murk of James Farncombe's lighting apart from the cold moonlight shafts that illuminate the grimy business or Orlando Gough's clanging music - never more ghastly than in a seriously misjudged 'party' scene where presumably well-brought-up Equity card-holding actors do a mentalist pogo-ing conga round the set, strenuously giving off "WE'RE OFF THE CHAIN, US".

One wonders how the performers will play the remaining shows?  Will they stick to Norris' depressing concept or will they actually try and give performances of character?  The much-vaunted casting of Rory Kinnear and Anne-Marie Duff fails to generate any heat: it's almost like neither of them wants to pull focus from the other.  In HAMLET, Rory Kinnear displayed a remarkable facility for making the most well-known speeches sound fresh but he is developing a worrying vocal shtick - which was actually effective in Norris' THE THREEPENNY OPERA - of falling into a distressingly fake Mockney accent which he drowns in here, hitting consonants with an exaggerated wallop such as "Is THis a DAgger I SEe BEfore Me" till you want to scream at the stage JUST SPEAK IN YOUR ORDINARY VOICE!  All the more annoying as he calms down for the 'murder of Duncan' sequence and the "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" speech.

Anne-Marie Duff also disappointed in a performance that hardly made it to where we were sitting at the back of the stalls.  She started promisingly but her performance grew so colourless that I wanted to ask why she didn't assert herself and more importantly her character in the rehearsal room - there are certain Shakespeare female characters that you suspect the Bard simply threw out some scenes because they were too difficult for the boy actors who played them; a good actress will be able to 'fill in' the gaps of Gertrude or Lady Macbeth but Duff sadly lives up to her surname.

She can't even make Lady Macbeth's haunting mad scene anything other than just another drab scene - I could not help but think of when Maggie Smith asked Coral Brown for advice on playing the role as Coral had made a success of it in New York in the 1950s - her advice?  "It's a fucker darling, and remember to keep your eyes open during the sleepwalking scene, for some reason it rivets the fuckers!"  Oh Coral, that you should be alive at this hour.

Other performances fitfully come to life: the always hair-trigger Patrick O'Kane gave us an over-the-top Macduff but was momentarily effecting at his horror at the death of his family, Trevor Fox was a relentlessly Geordie Porter - oh no, Rufus Norris, you couldn't cut the Porter's speech could you? - and Kevin Hardy was an interesting Banquo (despite the scouse accent) until he was called upon to lurch around the stage as Banquo's ghost like a SHAUN OF THE DEAD blob-job performer.

Amaka Okafor was a dignified Lady Macduff and I liked the little that Nicholas Karimi did as Lennox but the three actresses playing the witches were saddled with modern-day "torture porn" horror film persona's and the two actors playing the assassins deserve to be shot for their over-the-top ONLY WAY IS ESSEX chav acting.

To say I was disappointed by this is to put it mildly and it does nothing to stop the creeping suspicion that after the dog shows of SALOMÉ, SAINT GEORGE AND THE DRAGON, COMMON and his own WONDER.LAND, Rufus Norris is clueless about how to use the Olivier stage to it's best advantage.

This is Rufus Norris' first Shakespeare production in 25 years.  It shows.

THE TEMPEST at Sadlers Wells - David Bintley's damp squib

Almost a year ago we went to Sadler's Wells to see a triple bill from Birmingham Royal Ballet, the works choreographed by the company's artistic director David Bintley.  There were all enjoyable in their own way with one, THE KING DANCES, being truly memorable, so when it was announced that Bintley's dance adaptation of Shakespeare's THE TEMPEST was to appear at Sadler's Wells, we were keen to see it.

Sadly, although commendable in various areas of the production, it left you feeling that this TEMPEST had blown itself out somewhere between Birmingham and London.

I would have thought that you would want to stage a ballet of THE TEMPEST if you had an extra dimension to bring to the play but I sat there as one scene followed another from the play feeling more and more becalmed...yes there were nice moments but they were fleeting.

Ultimately it all felt a little too polite; as Virginia Woolf said of another female writer "It aimed to soar but agreed to perch".  There was no particular larger-than-life feel to it, no feeling that between them Prospero and Ariel could conjure up wonders.  Sally Beamish's score was interesting in spells (no pun intended) but ultimately for most of the first act was too wishy-washy to inspire much excitement.

The infuriating thing was that there were good things within it: Rae Smith's excellent set suggested the curves in the bottom of a boat and had a great reveal at the end when the ship was suddenly revealed as in burnished copper, ready to return the principals to Naples.  The opening image too showed great promise: the burnished, glittering ship seen in miniature hanging in mid-air only to be caught and held aloft by an airborne Ariel.

There were also likeable turns from Jenna Roberts as Miranda, Mathias Dingman as Ariel and Tyrone Singleton as Caliban but Iain Mackay's Prospero felt woefully undercharged and flashed around the stage more like a ballet version of Captain Jack Sparrow than as the vengeful deposed Duke of Milan.

Only in the last ten minutes or so did the production kick into life when Bruno Poet's lighting created a circle of magic in the darkness for Prospero to confront his enemies but Bintley's gesturing choreography could never match or even illustrate the haunting quality of a speech like Prospero's "Our revels now are ended..."

After the effortless magic of The Royal Ballet's LA FILLE MAL GARDÉE a few days earlier, this all felt... well, over to you Will Shakespeare... "like this insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack behind".

The Prince of The Pagodas

A few weeks ago Owen and I went to see the Birmingham Royal Ballet's production of THE PRINCE OF THE PAGODAS, the only ballet that Benjamin Britten wrote the score for.

It was created in 1957 by the Royal Ballet but has had a checkered past with choreographer John Cranko's libretto coming in for most of the criticism.  Here it was presented in a new version by choreographer David Bintley.  Once I found out it was Britten I was doubtful if I would manage to stay the course as I have never understood the appeal but I found it the best part of the evening - apart from the ice-cream of course.

The plot still needs work: a princess is grieving for her brother who died mysteriously some years before and whose stepmother has taken control of the court while the emperor pines for his lost son.  A parade of possible suitors includes a mysterious Salamander prince who the princess escapes with.  They journey to his kingdom through water and fire and eventually she discovers that the prince is her assumed-dead brother and together they journey back to over-throw the wicked Empress.

The critics have a point, the plot felt like it was stitched together from many different stories and ultimately was only there to give a framework to the bouncing about.  The problem was I just didn't engage with it despite Rae Smith's visually exuberant sets and Peter Teigen's lush lighting.

I have never been a classical ballet fan.  While sitting in the Coliseum my mind went back to the 1980s when the late Martin Taylor took me to see Natalya Makarova in ONEGIN and saying in the interval that he hoped I was aware I was seeing a great performance.  Actually I thought she had already given a great performance in the Rodgers & Hart musical ON YOUR TOES a couple of years before especially when she played the cabaret dancer in the exhilarating "Slaughter On Tenth Avenue" number.

I also think that I was a fan of Isadora Duncan from an impressionable age and agreed with her quote that it was "a school of affected grace and toe walking".  So I can never be swept away by classical ballet, all I see is the court entertainment and piss-elegance of the extended curtain calls.

I am not a fan of opera either, primarily because I find it hard to engage with the distilled forms - the voice with opera, the body with ballet.  One cannot doubt the expertise of the dancers but give me the excitement of Matthew Bourne's productions any day.

 

I did like the sea horses though!

Designing Theatre...

My last two trips to the National Theatre this year have both been to see new plays adapted from children's literature and it was interesting to see the different ways that they were staged.  The one thing they both did was to give the production teams a free hand - but was it to the detriment of the shows?

First up off the rank was THE LIGHT PRINCESS, a new musical written by alternative pop singer Tori Amos and playwright Samuel Adamson that is based on a fairy tale by George MacDonald.  I honestly had no idea what to expect when we took our seats as I had stayed away from all the reviews.  Indeed I wasn't too sure why I had booked in the first place as I am not a big Amos fan - it just seemed a good show to see on an Autumn Sunday afternoon!  However we were both instantly onside as the front-cloth was a colourful and glittering map of the imaginary lands of Lagobel and Sealand.

The show has a major plus in that it's creative team of director Marianne Elliott, designer Rae Smith and lighting designer Paule Constable were responsible for WAR HORSE.  They have brought their collective excellence to this project too, the show is a visual treat and the somewhat twee story is told with a bold panache by Elliott.  What is truly odd however is that at no time do any of the humans in THE LIGHT PRINCESS ever make you care for them as much as you care for puppet Joey in WAR HORSE.

We follow the story of two motherless royals - Princess Althea (Rosalie Craig), the daughter of the King of Lagobel, has refused to ever cry again following the deaths of both her mother and brother and has become so deliberately light-hearted that she has lost her sense of gravity and floats instead of walking.  Her father (Clive Rowe) is at his wit's end so keeps her locked in a tower bedroom where she is tethered by her faithful servant Piper (Amy Booth-Steel).

Meanwhile in the neighbouring country of Sealand the young Prince Digby (Nick Hendrix) since the loss of his mother has lost all mirth and is continually down-hearted.  His wicked father (Hal Fowler a.k.a. Mr. Kim Wilde) actually had his wife killed and rules his country with an iron fist.  His disconsolate son's only friend is his brother Llewelyn (Kane Oliver Parry) and his only joy is with his mother's falcon.

Of course when the two countries resume their eternal war for each other's land, the two royals are bound somehow to meet and of course fall in love.  But their idyll by the lonely lake in The Wilderness which separates their countries cannot last and all seems lost for the young lovers.

The original story has been rewritten by Adamson to have a rather leaden feminist overtone which at times is bearable but at other times is thumpingly obvious as to appear to be a reworking of a Drill Hall feminist panto from the early 80s.  My other concern was the rather listless score by Adamson and Amos which carries enough of her standard introspection but not enough variation to give the musical it's all-important rise and fall. 

 

Indeed in the second act Clive Rowe had a ballad that was so one-note as to make you wonder if it would actually ever end - it was only the thought that at some point he must have gone to sleep the night before that gave me hope for it's conclusion.  Saying this I have to say that the meeting of Craig and Hendrix in the first act was one of the most lovely and lyrical falling-in-love pas-de-deux I have seen.

These things are all the more irritating because visually the show is a such a triumph.  Of course there is the possible argument that Elliott has stuffed the production with puppetry, physical theatre elements and good old fashioned stage magic to distract from these central weaknesses but these tend to slip your mind when you are keeping an eye out for the scene-stealing rodent that lives in Althea's bookshelf, marvelling at the swirling colourful birds that play key moments in the action and the amphibian creatures of Althea and Digby's lakeside home.

Rosalie Craig's performance was all the more impressive for the physicality that is involved in it.  Whether she is soaring on her wire or being passed around the stage by the onstage acrobats she never dropped the level of her singing and made Althea a passionate and vital presence - if a touch too much of a bluestocking.  Nick Hendrix - last seen as the under-achieving older brother in THE WINSLOW BOY - brought more to Prince Digby than was on the page.

In a sometimes solid, sometimes stolid supporting cast, I particularly enjoyed Malinda Parris as the Serjeant-at-Arms and Laura Pitt-Pulford as the Falconer.  By the fairy-tale finale I must admit I had been swept along by Elliott's mis-en-scene and have booked to see the show again before New Year's Eve so I guess I liked it after all.

The second show which was an even more blatant example of design over content was this year's Christmas production in the Olivier, EMIL AND THE DETECTIVES, adapted for the stage by Carl Miller from the famous novel by Erich Kästner.

 

The National has a history of interesting Christmas shows based on 'intelligent' kid's books - HIS DARK MATERIALS, CORAM BOY, NATION and - yes that show again - WAR HORSE.

 

I have never read EMIL nor seen any of the five film versions so this was all new to me. 

 

Um.. I'm still not too sure what it's all in aid of as we were 20 minutes late due to a mix-up over the start time.  Sigh, sadly this is where my theatrical autism kicks in - if I don't see a show from the lights going down then all I see are people walking around a stage saying words, I just cannot give myself over to it.

 

 

Anyhoo here we are in 1929 Germany and Emil is a young lad who journeys to Berlin from his small town with money saved by his mother from her job that he has to deliver to his grandmother.  On the train journey he shares a carriage with the mysterious Mr. Snow who on learning of Emil's reason for travelling, drugs him and steals the money.  Emil wakes up and chases after the slippery Mr. Snow but where can a young boy who's alone in the city turn to for help in catching an adult?

 

To the 'Detectives' of course.  A rag-tag group of Berliner children who befriend Emil and using their network of friends across the city seek out the nasty Mr. Snow.  Led by the know-it-all Toots and incorporating Emil's girl cousin Pony The Hat (shrugs) Mr. Snow doesn't stand a chance.

 

 

It's a charming tale that tells a good story of friendship helping to triumph over the baddy but it also seemed to be stretched terribly thin across the huge Olivier stage.  Enter Bunny Christie to distract us all with a set that echoed the era of German expressionism with wonky angled sets allied with film and projections to render the stage alive with movement at all times.  As much as I liked the design, it totally engulfed the production - when you are more interested in what the set is going to do rather than what happens to your hero you know something is awry.

 

Out of a fairly non-descript cast, the younger actors impressed the most.  I am fairly certain our Emil was Toby Murray and he had a nice stillness to his performance which made him stand-out from the clamour onstage, Izzy Lee was good as the bolshy daredevil Pony on her bike and Georgie Farmer impressed as the ringleader Toots who is not half as self-assured as he seems.  Ryan Quarterly was also good as Petzoid, one of the gang who all too soon reveals a hatred for all things non-German and turns the play momentarily toward what was to happen soon.

 

 

I'm not sure whether this character exists in the book or whether he has been written that way by Carl Miller but for the rest of the play, after he is ostracised by the group, I wondered what would have happened to our scrappy bunch of crime-busters when the real Nazty men took over.  The slightly uneven and woozy feeling of Bijan Sheibani's production is probably down to a feeling that it's time-setting is too close to an impeding nightmare that one cannot readily put out of one's mind in retrospect.

 

Or maybe I just feel that because I was not totally immersed in the production?

Sweet Bird of Youth flies away...

Last week I finally saw the Old Vic's production of Tennessee Williams' 1959 play SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH in it's last week.  When we arrived there was a queue snaking around onto Waterloo Road just to collect tickets.  When I finally got to the counter they hadn't even printed my tickets off for collection.  Jesu Christi - what on earth had they been doing all day?

I had seen the play once before, in 1985 when Harold Pinter directed Lauren Bacall and Michael Beck (whatever happened to...) at the Haymarket in a production of which I retain the flimsiest of shadowy images.  I do remember Bacall being suitably domineering when her character flared into full diva status but unable to convince as the scared and frantic washed-up star. 

I had also seen Richard Brooks' 1962 film version in which Paul Newman (Chance), Geraldine Page (Alexandra), Madeleine Sherwood (Miss Lucy) and Rip Torn (Tom Jnr) recreated their original stage roles while Ed Begley won an Academy Award as the corrupt politician 'Boss' Finley.  Geraldine Page was memorable in only her fourth film role.

 

SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH was almost the last of Williams' run of 'classic' plays with just THE NIGHT OF THE IGUANA to come.  In 1963, written in the shadow of his partner's death, THE MILK TRAIN DOESN'T STOP HERE ANYMORE started the decline in both quality and his popularity.  His alcoholism and drug dependency made the quality of his later plays more erratic and harder to like so he was judged by producers and critics to be a busted flush.

Knowing this, it makes SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH an unsettling experience as the air of desperation at the passing of time hangs heavily on the main characters.  Another reason why I like the play less than his earlier works is I feel Williams' ambivalence towards his characters.  None of his characters here are written with the love you feel he invested in Laura Wingfield, Blanche du Bois, Lady Torrence or Maggie & Brick.  Although both Alexandra and Chance can easily be seen as having the traits of Williams' 'fugitive kind', they both lack Williams' soul.

Chance Wayne (Seth Numeric) returns to his home town on America's Gulf Coast, hiding out in the shabby elegance of the hotel where he once worked in the bar.  Chance left with hopes of becoming a film star but his dream foundered and he ended up as the plaything of rich, older women.

His latest meal-ticket is film star Alexandra Del Largo (Kim Cattrall) who is travelling with him under the name of Princess Kosmonopolis.  She too is a fugitive from her life as she believes her screen comeback has failed disastrously and is lost in drink, drugs and hysteria.

However Chance wants to use Alexandra for one more... er... chance: wanting her to use her alleged star power to launch him as her new 'discovery'.  But he also has an ulterior motive - to win back his first love, the groanworthy-named Heavenly (Louise Dylan) who is unfortunately the daughter of 'Boss' Finley (Owen Roe) the town's corrupt and white supremacist politician.

What Chance doesn't know is that after his last visit, he gave Heavenly an STD which has resulted in her father forcing her to have a hysterectomy and he is now out for revenge...

Director Marianne Elliott threw everything at the audience: in the big climactic scene, we have flashbulbs going off, thunder and lightning as a storm breaks, 'Boss' Finley haranguing the audience on large TV screens and amplified sound and Finley's thugs beating up a heckler while Finley's mistress screams her head off.  The odd thing was that none of it seemed out of place!  She also kept the pace going until the final scene which seemed oddly becalmed.

In a cast where the accents swung all over the place, the best performance came from Owen Roe as 'Boss' Finley who cast a loathsome shadow over the play as an all-too-believable "Family & State" politician who approves of castrating black men and denies the existence of his mistress.  I liked Kim Cattrall's exhausted and suspicious Alexandra, in particular how she slipped back into the manner of the screen diva as easily as donning her fur wrap.  She certainly humanised Alexandra - but does a humanised Alexandra serve the play?  I'm not really sure it does.

For the most part Seth Numrich was fine as Chance, his self-belief radiating from him but in the last scene I felt he simply drained away the closer Chance got to his destiny.  This production knitted together several versions of the play and Numrich's poetic last lines seemed oddly out of keeping with his performance up until then.  Also a special mention for Brid Brennan's Aunt Nonnie, a woman used to being ignored and browbeaten in the Finley household.

I also feel compelled to mention Lucy Robinson playing 'Boss' Finley's not-so-secret mistress Miss Lucy who gave a performance of quite jangling inadequacy.  It's a role that gives some spark of humanity as the forces of darkness move in but her shockingly poor attempt at a Southern accent had me wishing one of designer Rae Smith's peeling columns to fall on her just to stop the noise.

I am glad I saw it as it made me reassess this play in contrast with Tennessee Williams' earlier plays but I left the theatre with the feeling that the full power this play is capable of had not been fully explored.